Will Sabotage and Distortion Ruin Wikipedia?
"Can [Wikipedia] stop sabotage and distortion without losing the freedom and openness that made the reference possible?"
asks David Mehegan in part one of a 2 part series about Wikipedia in The Boston Globe.
"I think that global universal access to basic information can have a transformative impact on the world,"
explains Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales about why he started Wikipedia.
This part of the series looks at some of the recent negative incidents, like the staff of members of Congress editing certain articles to remove negative portions and the John Seigenthaler, Sr., situation. Mehegan also encouraged some scholars to look at articles in their areas and reports on their opinions about Wikipedia’s accuracy. The print edition has a sidebar with reports of inaccuracies in several articles. I wonder if they’ve been edited out yet.
Part two should include some interviews with Wikipedians.
Addendum: I looked up the items in the sidebar to see if anyone had changed them. Checking the page histories reveals some of these corrections happened today.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s entry lists the correct date for the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
- The text in the Tom Lantos article describing an accident in the Capitol parking area was replaced word-for-word with what David wrote in the sidebar.
- As of 11:58 AM EST, Cardinal Bernard Law’s bio still has the supposed error that the Archdiocese closed 65 parishes before he stepped down.
- The Hingham, Massachusetts entry’s text better specifies that Abraham Lincoln’s ancestors came from Hingham, England, includes a footnote, and corrected the error about the town having a statue of Bejamin Lincoln.
- Bcorr’s edit to George Weller’s bio is labeled "as per Boston Globe ref" and corrects the errors David mentions in the sidebar. Guess I’m not the only one reading the article right now. = )
- The Emily Dickinson section now has a link to The Boston Globe article near the correction of Dickinson’s relationship to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Bcorr also made that change.
I think I’ve bumped into Bcorr online before, but I’m not sure I’ve met him in person. It’s quite possible we have met and I just don’t remember.
I mostly undertook this exercise to show how quickly errors brought to the attention of the Wikipedia community can get corrected. I’m more puzzled that the Cardinal Law article hasn’t been changed already (maybe Bcorr hasn’t gotten there yet) than I am that the other errors have been fixed. I don’t feel comfortable about making the changes because I don’t know enough about the diocese problems to know whether the Globe’s claim that parishes weren’t closed under Cardinal Law is true. As much as I want to believe the Globe is correct, I know some journalists can also make errors.
I’m sure David realized that the errors he mentioned in his sidebar wouldn’t stand long. It’s kind of an odd situation that when a journalist points out errors in Wikipedia, they sometimes get altered so quickly, the journalist might look foolish to many people who go to the encyclopedia looking for the errors and don’t find them. The errors were really there before, folks. Check the page histories.
I wonder if David is sitting at a computer somewhere this morning watching the changes, too.
Addendum 3/25: Part two of the series
February 12th, 2006 at 7:34 pm
It’ll be interesting to see what is made of the corrections for this story which I submitted.
February 13th, 2006 at 12:05 am
You know it’s gonna drive us all nuts not to know what your submitted corrections are, right?
Oh, yeah. That’s probably why you just casually mentioned it … ; )~
February 13th, 2006 at 11:34 pm
For your delectation:
David,
There are three possible errors in the first part of your story “Bias,
sabotage haunt Wikipedia’s free world”. I’m James Day, one of the
members of the Wikimedia Foundation server admin team (a “developer”
in Wikipedia parlance) and an “administrator” at the English language
wikipedia.org site. This means that in addition to the administrator
access, I have direct access to query the database servers and produce
reports from their content which are not generally available.
‘In a Wikipedia biographical article, after the accurate statement
that ”Seigenthaler was the assistant to Attorney General Robert
Kennedy in the early 1960s,” someone had added’
My recollection is that the derogatory text was not added but was
present initially. I’m unable to check at present because the original
items were removed from the article history and are not visible to
administrators at wikipedia.org. This is significant because the main
reaction to the text was to disable the creation, but not subsequent
editing, of articles by those who had not created an account. This
measure would be entirely ineffective if the text was simply “added”
and not present at creation. A check of the database I did just after
this measure was introduced revealed that in the previous month
approximately one third of all new articles had been created by people
without accounts.
‘Though Wales deleted the history of the original sabotage, all the
garbage written since is there for inspection.’
A logged in administrator will see the following on the history page:
“View or restore 15 deleted edits?”. This indicates that there are 15
edits not visible in the article history visible to the general
public. Further, in a check a few months ago I found that the original
edits which created the article were not available to anyone and that
hundreds of edits had been moved to articles with different names and
deleted, so they are not part of the 15 count. I’ve included further
details at the end of this email. It’s undeniable that there are many
things in the history visible to the public which Mr. Seigenthaler is
likely to find offensive. There’s a tension here between the desires
to maintain a historically accurate record and to sanitize the messy
parts of history. Personally, absent clear legal requirement to
sanitize, I prefer an accurate historical record of what happened,
including the distasteful parts.
‘On his own, Seigenthaler tracked down the saboteur to a business in
Nashville’
Please see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Seigenthaler_Sr._Wikipedia_biography_controversy
section “Anonymous editor identified” for an accurate description of
events. Note also that the USA Today op-ed piece which started the
media focus on this event contains a description of Mr. Seigenthaler’s
inability to identify the person who had written the offensive
material.
It’s not strictly an error but the following repeats a very commonly
reported but misleading sequence of events:
‘Seigenthaler called Wales, who was appalled at the slander and
quickly wiped it out.’
When Mr, Seigenthaler contacted Mr. Wales, the offensive material had
already been removed from the live article on 23 September by a
then-anonymous author and remained only in the article history. Mr.
Wales’ intervention on 7 October caused several revisions to be
removed from the article history. The offensive text was first removed
in this edit:
a.. Wikipedia history line for 23 September edit which first replaced
problematic text with Freedom Forum First Amendment Center biography:
“11:06, 23 September 2005 . . 69.172.115.157 (This is the correct bio.
The previous entry was bogus.)”
This edit is not present in the history of the article. Eric Newton
subsequently claimed to have made that edit.
If you are willing I would appreciate you presenting this less
misleading sequence of events for the following reasons:
1. It’s nice to have journalists not repeating each others mistakes
about how things were removed (see your own article’s criticism of
Wikipedia for a similar problem)
2. It illustrates the usefulness of public editing in correcting an
error, a welcome balancing item in a story which necessarily
concentrates on the ability to introduce errors.
It’s not an error but Mr. Wales has objected to the use of “soft core”
to describe Bomis content, (I’m speculating) possibly because that is
sometimes used to mean simulated sex acts as opposed to hard core
where the physical acts are not simulated. To the best of my knowledge
such simulated sex acts have never been present at Bomis. The more
explicit “pictures of topless women” would be somewhat less ambiguous
in indicating the nature of the content. Personally, I think that
Jimbo is foolish to object to the terminology but that’s his choice to
make. This paragraph is not a request that you modify this, I’m simply
making you aware of the existence of the disagreement.
If you would like to discuss these points or others, please feel free
to contact me. My preferred method is via AOL Instant messenger to
account _censored_ which can then be followed by telephone contact if
you desire. _censored_
James Day
The edit summaries for the “15″ versions not in the public history are
as follows:
a.. 19:10, 6 December 2005 . . Johnleemk (Reverted edits by
69.133.205.8 (talk) to last version by Kaldari)
b.. 19:10, 6 December 2005 . . 69.133.205.8
c.. 19:09, 6 December 2005 . . Kaldari (Reverted edits by
69.133.205.8 (talk) to last version by Brian0918)
d.. 19:08, 6 December 2005 . . 69.133.205.8
e.. 19:06, 6 December 2005 . . 69.133.205.8
f.. 18:59, 6 December 2005 . . Brian0918 (Reverted edits by
69.133.205.8 (talk) to last version by Kaldari)
g.. 18:59, 6 December 2005 . . 69.133.205.8
h.. 18:51, 6 December 2005 . . Brian0918 (moved John Seigenthaler
Sr./temp2 to John Seigenthaler Sr.)
i.. 18:43, 6 December 2005 . . Brian0918 (moved John Seigenthaler
Sr./temp to John Seigenthaler Sr./temp2)
j.. 18:22, 6 December 2005 . . Brian0918 (copyediting)
k.. 18:22, 6 December 2005 . . Brian0918 (moved John Seigenthaler
Sr. to John Seigenthaler Sr./temp)
l.. 18:22, 6 December 2005 . . Brian0918 (moved John Seigenthaler
Sr. to John Seigenthaler Sr./temp: copyediting)
m.. 21:52, 29 May 2005 . . SNIyer12
n.. 14:29, 26 May 2005 . . 65.81.97.208
o.. 19:53, 15 September 2004 . . 65.170.144.130
Retrieved from “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Undelete”
February 14th, 2006 at 12:44 am
Wowza. Thanks for sharing and for clarifying.
Now that’s a better Valentine’s Day present than flowers. ; )